You Win, You Lose

February 19, 2009, 12:00 am

By Corey Pein

Recently I interviewed Greg Zanetti, who was deputy commander of the US military base at Guantanamo Bay until returning home to Albuquerque last month. “You didn't see a whole lot of people clamoring to become the detainee affairs executive director on the Obama team,” Zanetti quipped.

This morning's Al Kamen column in The Washington Post has some gossip on who might be in line for the most thankless job in the universe:

There's talk that Phillip Carter, who used to write the popular Intel Dump blog for The Washington Post's Web site, is penciled in to be named deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, overseeing such places as the Guantanamo Bay and Bagram detention facilities.

Carter, a lawyer in New York, was on active and reserve duty for nine years in the U.S. Army as a military police and civil affairs officer. From October 2005 to September 2006, he was an embedded adviser with the Iraqi police in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province. He has also written friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases on administration policies, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which struck down the Bush administration's military commissions for trying detainees at Guantanamo. Carter also worked on Vets for Obama during the campaign.